Poetry by Paula Lewis-Gamble

                      ​ spablab CC



A LOVELY LIFE

Days pass in a succession of alarms: 
shower, keep breathing, call your mother.
I do not leave

the house but I do get out
of bed sometimes,
to sit at the worn oak table

in the corner of the kitchen and wait
for the dog to indicate her need to piss.
I find it kinda funny

the way her left ear folds back:
soft, pink skin offering
itself to every ‘good girl!’
                
                                                                            (In this way, I think we are alike)

I’ve nothing new to say. 

It’s raining.
The woman across the street
is a thought-cloud, that curious sheep: 

umbrella floating like a
question above her head.
Are the women all accounted for, before I go to sleep?

It’s enough 
to make you shear 
your own skin.

It’s pissing down,
the woman is a black cloud,
the dog is playing dead

                                                                             black cloud
                                                                                                        black dog
                                                                                                                                 dead


I take the pills to keep me awake -
which are not to be confused
with the pills to make me fall

asleep, or the pills to stop 
the intrusive thoughts - they
bring their own alarm.

I get serotonin-drunk, count 
breaths until my fingers numb,
and call my mother — who is fine

by the way, in that way of us
always being fine. An inter-
generational fine-ness. I come 

from a long line of fine women:
grin-bearing, broad shouldered. 
How heavy can the world be? 

I’m not as sad as I seem. 
I’m what they call managing
which I guess means I’m somehow

the one with all the answers, yet
I question the wisdom of leaving 
all this in my butter-hands. Once, 

I slipped and landed 
on the wrong side of consequence.
Both of these things are a lie. 

So the days pass
in their alarming way, and I am nothing 
if not my mother’s daughter.

Really,       it is a lovely life:

there are freshly picked
flowers in a crystal-cut vase.

Shower, breathe, 
scream 
into coffee cups. ​


​

Paula Lewis-Gamble is an emerging writer and poet from Wales, UK who studied Creative Writing with The Open University. Paula writes about mental illness, gendered violence, body image bias, and other fun things.
She can mostly be found wearing pyjamas.